5 Under 30: Young Photographers’ Competition at Daniel Blau, London

Daniel Blau Photography Gallery has announced the winners of its first annual 5 under 30 competition. Marianne Bjornmyr, Madoka Furuhashi, Andi Schmied, Tereza Cervenova and Lara Morrell will have their work displayed at a group exhibition opening on 5 July. It’s a varied selection that includes landscape, still life and portraits shot in the UK, Europe and the Middle East.

Marianne Bjørnmyr is a Norwegian artist, living and working in London. Her photographic practice is concerned with culture intertwined with landscape; myth with story; and belief with desire. The project Shadows/Echoes II presents a culmination of perceived ideas, a myriad of stories and myths, where the authors of the material have become blurred. Photographs have been collected and archived in an attempt to get closer to a system of belief in Iceland, where the existence of elves and fairies are most certainly not considered marginal; photographs depicting Icelandic clairvoyants attempt to photograph what we cannot see with our bare eyes. Without any valid proof of the ‘Hidden’ world, the gathered material operates as a link between the existing reality and the possibility of another, bringing the familiar into doubt.

Madoka Furuhashi is a Japanese artist, completing a MA in Photography at the Royal College of Art. Furuhashi’s art practice investigates forms of exhibitions, displays and other ways of instituting ‘arts’ by generating their significance. In the series of works entitled Inventory of 140 Old Ford Road, objects found in Furuhashi’s home in Bethnal Green, London are set into displays reminiscent of museum or gallery exhibitions. The photographer takes inspiration from Marcel Duchamp’s Readymades, and explores the ways in which apparently redundant everyday objects can be re-envisioned as valuable, meaningful and significant. This body of work is presented alongside a further series of conceptual photographs entitled Condition Report.

Andi Schmied is a Hungarian artist, having studied in diverse cities such as Budapest, Tel Aviv and London. Throughout her artistic practice, her main interest has been the psychological landscape of the urban reality from a human and architectural point of view. Tel Aviv at its beginning, just over a hundred years ago, was inhabited by early settlers and later a massive inflow of people – both young and old – mainly from Europe and the Middle East. Those young people are now the oldest part of the population and only 10% of them were born there. In her Tel Aviv Grannies series, Schmied documents the everyday lives of this elderly segment of Israeli society. Schmied walked the streets, visited the beaches, joined them in their play and sports activities, their private pilates classes and opera nights out to capture them on film.

Tereza Cervenova is a Slovakian photographer, currently undertaking a BA in Photography at Middlesex University. In her series Identity, Cervenova creates an expansive self-portrait through her depictions of other people. By photographing young women, she explores the ways in which her earlier experiences as a model have influenced her life and sense of identity. The photographer works with natural light and employs analogue shooting and printing processes in order to create intimate portrayals of female friends, relatives and acquaintances.

Lara Morrell is a British artist, completing a MA in Photography at Central Saint Martins. The name of the project, Christ Stopped at Novoli is a play on the title of a memoir by Carlo Levi, Christ stopped at Eboli in which he gives an account of his political exile from Mussolini’s regime in remote towns in southern Italy. Choosing the group of apostles to question various issues surrounding Catholicism throughout history, Morrell incorporates the ancient Italian technique of Carta Pesta, which involves creating a wire skeleton and moulding a form using hay and string which is then covered with clay, sculpted, painted and adorned. In her photographs she chooses the saints’ methods of martyrdom as their main attribute, stripping them of decoration. The composition is inspired by Italian Renaissance painting and the lighting by Caravaggio’s use of chiaroscuro.